Don’t get me wrong – data is a wonderful thing.
However, as speakers we need to be very careful when we encounter data that we want to share with our audience. It can be too easy to just back the truck up and dump a lot of facts and figures onto our audience with the hope that they’ll be able to sort them out. The answer is that they are not going to be able to understand what we’ve shared with them and they’ll leave our presentation confused and lost.
What this means for us is that when we try to use statistics and numbers to sway our audience, it’s going to be much better if we show them what we mean instead of telling them what we mean.
